rming system; the extension of Italy proper
from the Aesis to the Rubicon, and the conversion of Cisalpine Gaul
into a province. It may be considered certain that he did all that
he could to humiliate the equites; but the settlement of Italy was
probably not due to him.

[Sidenote: His minor measures.] Other minor laws of which he was the
author dealt with specific criminal offences or social matters. One,
as we have seen (p. 196) specified the penalties for all sorts of
assassination and poisoning. Another dealt with forgery, another with
violence to the person or property, another with marriage and probably
adultery. Another was a sumptuary law, which is said to have limited
the price of certain luxuries. If this was the case it was even
sillier than other sumptuary laws, for it would have encouraged
instead of checking gluttony. Lastly, there was a law for the
settlement of his colonies through Italy, and at Aleria in Corsica.

[Sidenote: Effects of Sulla's legislation.] Sulla had for the moment
undone by his legislation the work of ages. He gagged free speech by
the disabilities attached to the tribunate. He kept the government
within a close circle by his process of recruiting the Senate. He made
the magistrates subordinate to the Senate. He filled Italy and Rome
with his own partisans, and therefore with those of the Senate, and
he gave back to the Senate that coveted possession of the judicia for
which it had struggled so long with the equites. But a system which
could endure only by the repression not only of hostile interests but
of the ambition of its own adherents carried in itself the seeds
of early dissolution. Almost before the reaction was complete a
counter-reaction had begun. Abdication only revealed monarchy, and the
broad road which Sulla had laid over the breakers and quicksands of
revolution in reality paved the way to a throne.

[Sidenote: Sulla's abdication a farce.] When be abdicated, he offered
to render account to anyone for his acts, and there is a story that
one young man thereupon followed him to his home loading him with
abuse, which Sulla listened to with meekness. If the story be true,
the incident was probably a pre-arranged part of the ceremony of
abdication, which in everything, except the fact that Sulla slipped
off the cares of government, was of course a farce. His funeral showed
what his real power continued to be, and, if another anecdote be true,
just before his death he had a